Intel S2600cp Bios Update

[Lorin Cupples]

Iwas going to order one of the packages from here: -p/intel-s2600cp2j-128gb.htm and had planned to put two video cards into it thinking Gen 3 x8 will be fine. I'm a bit worried about the location and clearance however of other components on the motherboard in relation to the pcie slots

Most modern mid range and up video cards are dual slot due to their cooling. This would prevent me from slotting anything into the black pcie slots following the graphics card meaning I would lose 2 very valuable pcie slots. Considering server motherboards are light on features, I need these for sound cards and usb expansion cards (two things this board doesn't have).

I currently have 2x 280x ( -Cards/R9280XDC2T3GD5/) but plan to replace one with a smaller more efficient mid range Polaris 10 card when they come out in a few months. But due to the double slot cooling it has just occurred to me I don't think you can get two video cards into this board.

This configuration may work but the question remains with the length of video cards and whether the first blue slot with guide is blocked by memory slots. Would love ot hear back from anyone that owns this board.

Update: My current thinking to potentially get around the problem with long video cards and the ram slot obstruction is to relocate the card onto another x8 lane using a pcie riser ( -PCI-Express-Riser-Card-x8-to-x16-Left-Slot-Adapter-For-1U-Servers-/350958132910?hash=item51b6bc1eae:g:-ysAAOxyOlhSso9z). Have a different problem of not being able to screw it in quite as easily but it might be possible with a longer thread.

That certainly throws a spanner into the works doesn't it! I wasn't entirely clear if this was for pcie in general or when using an adapter / riser? Is an 'add in card' a bus riser or anything actually placed into the bus? Can anyone with this board test and / or confirm the PCIE speed achieved?

Interesting according to a few videos there doesn't seem to be much difference between gen 1.1 and 3.0 in terms of speed. This fairly in depth article shows some small differences ( _980_PCI-Express_Scaling/1.html)

Update: I have looked into this further and *generally* speaking it apepars as though there is little performance difference on video cards on gen 2 in most situations. Certainly not enough to justify me spending two or three times the price on a motherboard. I think this will be sufficient. If not, then I can always sell this motherboard and look for another motherboard in the coming months if any deals pop up.

Dual gpu to a single vm or two vm's on two gpus? I was testing the latter and it worked fine. For some reason I couldn't run two ovmf bios' though. An ovmf and a seabios combination worked with a 280x video card passed through to each vm running with both vm's running at the same time. Since the 280x requires the crossfire bridge there was no point testing passthrough of both gpu's to the same vm since I can't run crossfire (newer amd cards that don't require the crossfire bridge and perform crossfire over the pcie bus can).

I came here because i also bought a S2600CP board , and was trying to fit a x16 size gfx on the x16 slot on the board , and it does not fit because of memory right next to it , that started to make me worried so i found this thread

later with closer inspection i discovered that the 2 x8 blue pci slots on the board can handle x16 size gfx because they are cut on the back they have some supports right next to them to accommodate x16 sizes , regarding the speeds i cannot comment i have not finished the build.

You don't really need to worry about the speed of these blue open ended 8x slots. For gaming it makes almost zero difference to frame rates. The bandwidth is more important when you consider things like hard drives.

I'm not familiar with that particular drive but the peak theoretical bandwidth of pcie gen 2 8x should be about 4GB/s. I think some of the modern nvme drives are doing >3 so if I had to hazard a guess I would say probably not. I'd also like to hear from anyone else that knows a bit more on the subject. I haven't had time to really look into this but I'd like to add an nvme drive at some point.

Could you share your motherboard bios settings, and also any other ESXI settings on how you run 2 VMs on 2 GPUs? I have an Intel S2600IP4 which I can never get to boot up when I passthrough 2 x AMD 6450 to 2 X windows 10 VMs. Much thanks

@JustJoshin would you be able to help me with my virtual setup. I have the intel s2600 with the dual xeons from natex but with 64gb of ram and a gtx 1080 . I want to do a Win10 VM and passthru graphics to the gtx1080 along with a usb3.0 hub.

I am working on a S5000VSA server that was a clients, and I reluctantly started an inplace 2012 R2 upgrade on it since 2008 R2 is out of support and low and behold the server refuses to boot. Some googling suggests upgrading the firmware, but low and behold intel pulled the firmware for this model.

This is great. Thank you so much Horun. I will give the 101 firmware a shot and hope the intergrated RAID boots. It is funny the systen boots fine off the 2012 r2 dvd, but it won't off the RAID controller.

Thanks again Horun. The s5000VSA_DOS_BIOS101 BIOS worked! It cleared out the RAID configurations which had me sweating for a bit, but just had to regroup the proper drives back into the Vitural disks of the RAID config screen, and 2012 R2 is now booting and finished the 2008 R2 inplace update. I have always been for lack of a better word, and intel fanboy, but this move to pull older BIOS's and updates was a real dick move on intels part, specifically for server based products.

Hi guys , please kindly help i am stuck for days with the same Server s5000vsa, i want to find out whether can this server take win srv2019, I have created raid 10 with 4x 2tbs same brand but when i load OS via usb with ISO img, I dont see drives to install but when i change raid mode to enhanced or legacy i can see the drives, i have been looking for raid drivers i cant seem to get anything

Once you know which controller your board uses, you can try the drivers on or look on the Internet for generic drivers that support whatever controller you do have . You may not find drivers explicitly for Windows Server 2019, but drivers for older versions of Windows server might work . I am not sure how backward compatible Windows Server is, but lots of drivers from as far as Windows Vista do still work on Windows 10 . Also, as you likely already know, 32-bit Windows requires 32-bit drivers and 64-bit Windows requires 64-bit drivers.

Thanks, I am not sure If I am pointing to the right direction of which raid controller, but this server uses onboard hot swappable drives, I do however have a PCI raid controller (mr sata 300-8x L3-01038-02b)

EDIT: RAID is meant to increase resilience to hardware failure . It is not a backup solution. You do not make a backup by using the RAID controller's rebuild functionality to make a copy . This breaks redundancy while the rebuild is running and exposes you to DATA loss if the drive from which the controller is copying fails . Additionally, regularly doing this would be unnecessarily taxing on the drives. One scenario for a backup solution would be to use a separate volume connected either locally to he machine or via a network link (NAS) .

There are multiple software solutions to do this, Windows Server 2019 might even include one . Otherwise, a robocopy scheduled task , Synctoy (if that still exists ) or a variety of commercial products exist .

Thanks, it was very helpfully for me, iam working in and Intel S5000vsa-satar version, i have 2, 1 of them is dead, so i have e lot of ram fb-dimm, but its impossible for me get all that ram works together, i have 8 4GB KINGSTON FB-DIMMS thats was working perfect in the dead mobo, in this one i get only 16gb of ram, this mobo recognize the 4gb kingston like 2gb! I think that was about the bios! but now in the last bios version i have the same problem!

Also i have 4 4G Supertalent fb-dimms, that mem worls ok and the 4gb was correctly recognized, so the max amount of ram i get was 24GB, 16gb from the supertalent, and 8GB from Kingston fb-dimms, anybody knows what could be the problem?

thanks

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